On this page you will find some information on my ever increasing list of gadgets (is there ever an end to needing JUST another toy???). I can give you some advice on the product but keep in mind that these are very personal impressions. You might rate certain products and features differently!

At the moment I am using a GM2000 QCI mount from 10Micron with a 132mm apochromatic refractor made by William Optics.

Above: My main imaging scope the William Optics FL-132 on the 10micron GM2000 QCI Ultraportable

William Optics FLT-132

As I made quite good experiences with the Megrez triplet APO (except for the WO reducer which I never really liked) I decided to go for a FLT-132. You have to know that at the time of buying this scope it was quite controversial as several people assumed that for the price you wouldn't get real APO performance. I have to say after some nights out with this scope I'm pretty impressed by it's ease of use and by the quality pictures the optics can produce. With the large 4" field flattener (a TMB designed piece) you get pretty much pinpoint-perfect stars all over the APS-C size field of a Canon EOS 350D. Look for your self and check out some of the images a shot using the FLT-132 in the gallery.

William Optics Megrez II ED Triplet

I instantly fell in love with the small APO from William Optics. The triplet ED glass shows hardly any trace of false color and with a focal length of only 560 mm at an aperture of 80mm (f/7) it makes a great scope for astrofotography. Mounted piggy-back on the larger LX200GPS I got my first decent fotos. The optics show some field curvature at the edges but the field that you get with 560mm focal length and a large DSLR chip is big enough that I can just crop the images a little bit (shure a flat field across the plane would be nice though).

The mechanics and the finish are excellent as William Optics teescopes usually are. If you are into astrofotography I would however get a version with the 1:10 reduced focuser as it makes the difficult task of finding perfect focus somewhat easier.

All in all a great little scope ans surely great value for the money.

GM2000 QCI Ultraportable by 10micron

The GM2000 is a very accurate, heavy-duty mount with a load capacity of roughly 50kg. Even though the mount is massive it can be broken down into smaller pieces hence making this probably one of the highest rated "travel mounts". If you like more check out my review here.

Hutech modified Canon 40DH

Until very recently I used an unmoddified Canon EOS 350D. However it was sadly stolen during a vacation in Thailand...

The good side of it was that the insurance took over the damage and I was able to buy a Hutech modified Canon 40D. I have to say that the modified 40D just blows the 350D out of the water! Not only is the sensitivity far superior that that of an unmodded 350D but the LiveView feature make focusing and centering of stars extremely easy. The Live View feature is especially valuable if you don't have a computer around to help you with focusing.

CCD Labs Q-Guider

As a guide cam I use the CCD Labs Q-Guider. The Q-Guider is a very sensitive monochrome camera with a built in guider interface. The whole package is very light and is powered via an USB 2.0 port. Together with the PHD Guiding software autoguiding is a breeze!

Since I'm not awfully interested in visual astronomy I own only two eyepieces (ok, with a reticle eyepiece for the mount alignement it is three) - however the ones I own are of great quality.

For wide-field views I use a Tele Vue 35mm Panoptic and for closer views of planets or deepsky object I use a 16mm Tele Vue Nagler. The Tele Vue eyepieces are by far the best eyepieces I ever had the chance of looking through. So my suggestion to anyone getting into astronomy is to go for quality rather than quantity!

Here you find the software I use at the moment to control my scope and shoot the pictures posted in the Gallery.

Cartes du Ciel http://www.astrosurf.com/astropc/cartes/

Cartes du Ciel is a great and best of all free planetarium suftware. It contains a hughe amount of objects and can be updated online with the most recent list of comets etc. I really like the possibility to overlay a self made picture with a sky chart in order to identify all the objects you captured.

IRIS http://www.astrosurf.com/buil/us/iris/

Is a very powerful astronomical image processing software - but beware the software is quite tricky! However, Christian Buil did a great job with a comprehensive set of tutorials that even a slacker like me can follow!

ImagesPlus 3 http://www.mlunsold.com/

After I bought my Canon 40D from Hutech I needed a new application for focusing as DSLR Focus didn't support the 40D. With Mike Unsold's ImagesPlus 3 Camera Control perfect focusing with the 40D is really easy and spot on.

DeepSkyStacker http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english/index.html

DeepSkyStacker just made my slacker life even easier! DeepSkyStacker is an application that stacks multiple exposures, subtracts dark- and flat frames as well as offset normalization in a highly automated fashion with minimal user intervention. Once you defined a few easy parameters DeepSkyStacker races away and produces beautiful images out of your raw images. I usually fire the stacking process of after a successfull night just befor I catch some sleep...

PHD Guiding http://www.stark-labs.com/phdguiding.html

Ah, a tool to my liking :-) PHD stands for "Push Here Dummy" and takes over the tedious task of manual guiding. While there are other outoduiding applications out there none is so easy to handle and yet so accurate as PHD. Clearely one of the most valuable tools for astrophotography!

WCS http://wcs.ruthner.at/

What a great tool! WCS or "Web Cam Scheinern" (Scheinern is the German expression for the iterative polar alignement) aids in perfectly aligning your equatorial mount with the help of a web cam (like the Meade LPI or the TuCam). The program is abolutely straight forward and produces great results - finally my polar alignement is perfect :-)